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Are demons real? Carl Jung’s answer is not the one you expect — and it is far more unsettling than a simple no. This lecture from Academy of Ideas argues the demonic never vanished; it simply retreated from an enchanted world into the hidden depths of the modern mind. Through Jung’s ideas of participation mystique, projection, and psychological inflation, it shows how unseen forces still drive individuals and whole societies toward cruelty and mass psychosis. The invitation is clear: stop hunting for evil only in the outer world, and confront the darkness each of us carries within.
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Modern man is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by powers beyond his control.
The gods and demons have not disappeared at all. They have merely got new names.
For millennia, in cultures spanning the globe, men and women believed in the existence of demons and saw possession by such forces as an ever-present risk.
Most cultures developed practices and rituals to ward off demonic possession and to exorcise them from possessed individuals.
In the modern day, we consider ourselves to be more enlightened and view demonic possession as a superstitious belief of a bygone era.
In this video, we explore why the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung considered this view to be misguided.
The demons that wreaked havoc on our ancestors are still with us today.
They continue to possess us, to drive us into error, and to push us towards acts of evil.
Or as Jung writes,
We are possessed by the demons of sickness no less than our ancestors.
Our psyche is just as much in danger of being struck by some hostile influence.
We are just as much the prey of malevolent spirits of the dead,
or the victims of a magic spell cast by a strange personality.
Only we call all these things by different names, and that is the only advantage we have over primitive man.
To understand how our conception of the demonic has evolved and why we see demons as a superstition while our ancestors saw them as real,
we need to explore a defining feature of the primitive mindset, namely, its participation mystique.
Participation mystique was a concept introduced by the French philosopher Lucien Lévi-Brel in the early 20th century
To describe how primitive man lacked a sharp distinction between the inner world of the psyche and the outer world of the environment,
this psychological state was a result of primitive man’s high degree of unconsciousness.
The primitive, in other words, moved through life relying heavily on instinct and intuition.
And when elements of the unconscious pressed upwards towards the fringes of conscious awareness,
the primitive would project these elements onto the natural world as their egos were too
underdeveloped to integrate them into their self-concept. These projections created an
animated state of nature where objects such as plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and oceans,
as well as forces like fire, wind, thunder, and lightning, were imbued with human agency and
intention. Primitive man’s participation mystique, in other words, psychologically entwined him with
the natural world. Or as Jung explains,
beings are at the same time animals and everything is alive with ghosts and gods. As the psyche is
composed of an interplay of opposites, the good and the bad, the light and the dark, the creative
and the destructive, primitive man’s projections animated nature with benevolent and malevolent
forces. The projection of benevolent forces created the friendly and protective gods of nature,
guiding spirits, fairies, and wood nymphs, while malevolent projections, or the projection of the
dark and destructive elements of the psyche were viewed as nature’s dark spirits, angry gods,
or evil demons. Today we can scarcely imagine this state of mind anymore, writes Jung, and we can
form no proper conception of what it meant to live in a world that was filled from above with
the mysteries of God’s wonder, down to the very crucible of the smelter, and was corrupted from
below by devilish deception, tainted by original sin, and secretly animated by demons. Over the
millennia, the human psyche underwent a profound transformation. We became more self-aware and
this self-awareness acted as a wedge between subject and object. We increasingly differentiated
between the inner world of the psyche and the outer world of nature, and as the boundary between
inner and outer solidified, we withdrew our projections and pulled ourselves out of the
state of participation mystique. Or as Jung writes, first man was moved to deeds by unconscious
factors, and only a long time afterwards did he begin to reflect about the causes that had moved
him. Then it took him a very long time indeed to arrive at the preposterous idea that he must have
moved himself, his mind being unable to see any other motivating force than his own. When we
stopped using nature as the home for our projections, we forced these psychological
energies back within ourselves. We ceased to experience the outer world as populated by
spirits, gods, and demons, and in the process we de-psychized nature. Or as Jung explains,
the rabble of spooks that were formerly outside have now transported themselves into the psyche
of man, and when we admire the pure, i.e. de-psychized nature we have created, we willy-nilly
give shelter to our demons. Or as Jung writes in volume 10 of his collected works,
even though nature is de-psychized, the psychic conditions which breed demons are as actively at
work as ever. The demons have not really disappeared but have merely taken on another form. They
have become unconscious psychic forces. Jung believed that in withdrawing our projections
we didn’t get rid of the demonic, instead we magnified its danger. For at least when
primitive man projected these psychological forces and energies onto nature, he was aware
of their ever-present danger. Furthermore, when these forces and energies were experienced
as external, it promoted the development of religious and shamanic practices to confront
and contain them. But once we started to internalize the demonic, we forced it deeper
into the unconscious and began to deny that it existed. And as Jung so often stresses,
the more something is repressed, the more dangerous it becomes. Or as he writes,
After it became impossible for the demons to inhabit the rocks, woods, mountains, and rivers,
They used human beings as much more dangerous dwelling places in
Natural objects much narrower limits were drawn to their effectiveness
Only occasionally did a rock succeed in hitting a hut only rarely was it possible for a river to overflow its banks
Devastate the fields and drown people but a man does not notice it when he is governed by a demon
He puts all his skill and cunning at the service of his unconscious master thereby heightening its power a thousand fold
That modern man is vulnerable to what earlier ages have called demonic possession is most
visible in the behavior of those who occupy the highest levels of political power.
For the immense authority wielded by such individuals, an authority derived not from
moral virtue but from a willingness to partake in the corrupt machinations of the state,
creates a dangerous psychological condition.
It leads to psychological inflation, or what Jung called God-almightiness, where an individual
believes himself to be omnipotent and far superior to the masses over whom he rules.
Psychological inflation, as Jung explains, causes exaggeration, a puffed-up attitude,
loss of free will, delusion, and enthusiasm in good and evil alike.
As Jung conceptualized the psyche as a self-regulating system,
when our conscious attitude becomes too one-sided, as it does for the inflated individual,
it triggers an equal and opposite reaction from the unconscious or as he writes in volume 11 of
his collected works an inflation is always threatened with a counter-stroke from the
unconscious the counter-stroke for one with a god complex comes in the form of an activation
of the psychological forces of darkness depravity and destruction and these forces can completely
overwhelm the inflated individual leading to demonic possession or as jung writes we have
have lost our superstitious fear of evil spirits and things that go bump in the night, but, instead,
are seized with terror of people who, possessed by demons, perpetrate the frightful deeds of
darkness. That the doers of such deeds think of themselves not as possessed, but as Superman,
does not alter the fact of their possession. While many in the ruling class are controlled
by unconscious demonic forces, the masses are not immune to this condition. For when destructive
psychological forces press upwards to the fringes of consciousness, as they do for all of us at one
time or another, most people cannot accept that these dark powers reside within their own psyche
and so like our primitive ancestors we project them. But unlike the primitive, we no longer
project these forces onto nature. Science has taught us that rocks, trees, storms, and animals
cannot possess human agency. So, the victims of our projections are other people. We project the
demonic onto neighbors or colleagues, onto foreigners, immigrants, or members of different
ethnic groups or political parties. These others become the screen upon which we find the
unacknowledged darkness of our own soul, and once located there, we convince ourselves that it is
morally justified to bring harm to these people, as we think it will help rid the world of evil.
But what we overlook is that when we act in this manner we have fallen under the spell of demons,
and are not decreasing the amount of evil in the world, but contributing to its spread.
Or as Jung writes,
A dangerous situation is created because the disturbing effects are now attributed to an evil will outside ourselves,
which is naturally to be found nowhere else than with our neighbors on the other side of the river.
This leads to collective delusions, incitements to war and revolution, in a word, to destructive mass psychoses.
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